vanRossenHistory - The Rise of Hitler

Most religious movements and political dynasties throughout history have had one city that could be called the focal point, or heart, of the movement – Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople and so forth. For the Nazis, the heart of their movement was the magnificent medieval city of Nuremberg, symbolizing the link between Germany's Gothic past and its Nazi future.
Each September, a pilgrimage was held in which followers gathered from all over the Reich to participate in torchlight marches and solemn ceremonies honoring fallen Nazis. There were also big military-style parades, and most important of all, a chance to see the Führer in person.
In September 1934, American journalist William L. Shirer had just arrived in Germany to work as a reporter for the Hearst Company. He proceeded to keep a diary of the entire seven years he spent reporting from inside Hitler's Reich.
Shirer thought it would be a good idea to attend the 1934 Nuremberg Rally to better understand the Nazi phenomenon. On his very first evening in the old city, he found himself accidentally stuck among a throng of ten thousand people in front of Hitler's hotel, shouting: "We want our Führer!"

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Leni Riefenstahl chats with Heinrich Himmler during filing at Nuremberg in September 1934. Below: A scene from her finished "Triumph of the Will" shows women greeting Hitler upon his arrival in Nuremberg.

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Below: A clever camera angle used by Riefenstahl in her film makes Hitler appear larger than life on the movie screen.
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Below: One of the most enduring propaganda images of the Third Reich - the omnipotent Führer (with Himmler and Lutze) in front of 160,000 Germans arraigned in perfect geometrical formation.
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Below: Hitler with Riefenstahl in 1934. She remained a darling of the Third Reich for the duration - and went on to make a second notable film about the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

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"I was a little shocked at the faces," Shirer wrote in his diary, "when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I once saw in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers...they looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman."

The next morning, Shirer was among the attendees at the Rally's opening ceremony, held inside a large hall on the outskirts of Nuremberg. It was Shirer's first experience with Nazi pomp and pageantry.
"I am beginning to comprehend," he wrote, "some of the reasons for Hitler's astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman [Catholic] church, he is restoring pageantry and color and mysticism to the drab lives of 20th Century Germans. This morning's opening meeting...was more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral. The hall was a sea of brightly colored flags. Even Hitler's arrival was made dramatic. The band stopped playing. There was a hush over the thirty thousand people packed in the hall. Then the band struck up the Badenweiler March...Hitler appeared in the back of the auditorium and followed by his aides, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler and the others, he slowly strode down the long center aisle while thirty thousand hands were raised in salute."
To Shirer, the intoxicating atmosphere inside the hall was such that "every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired word from on high. Man's – or at least the German's – critical faculty is swept away at such moments, and every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself."
It was during this opening meeting that Hitler's victorious proclamation was read: "The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousand years."
At Hitler's personal request, a 31-year-old actress and movie director named Leni Riefenstahl was filming the entire week-long Rally. Utilizing thirty film cameras and 120 technicians, she produced an extraordinary film record of the festivities, featuring many unique camera angles and dramatic lighting effects.
Riefenstahl's finished masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, contains many impressive scenes, but perhaps none more powerful than the scene in which Hitler, Himmler, and the new SA leader, Viktor Lutze, walk down a wide aisle in the center of Nuremberg stadium flanked on either side by gigantic formations of Nazis in perfectly aligned columns.
In previous years, the three men walking that path would have been Hitler, Himmler and Röhm. But the troublesome Röhm was now dead, replaced by the dutiful and lackluster Lutze. Back in February, it had been Lutze who told Hitler about Röhm's comments concerning "that ridiculous corporal." For his steadfast loyalty, Lutze was given command of the SA with strict orders from Hitler to keep the Brownshirts firmly in line.
On Sunday, September 9th, during the Rally, Hitler faced a mass gathering of his SA Brownshirts for the first time since the Night of the Long Knives. In scenes well-documented by Riefenstahl's cameras, about 50,000 Brownshirts stood in neat formations and listened to a slightly edgy Hitler attempt to patch things up. Interestingly, the film also shows a huge cordon of SS guards in attendance.
"Men of the SA and SS," Hitler bellowed from the podium, "a few months ago a black shadow spread over the movement. Neither the SA, nor any other institution of the Party, has anything to do with this shadow. They are all deceived who believe that even one crack has occurred in the structure of our united movement...Only a lunatic or deliberate liar could think that I, or anybody, would ever intend to dissolve what we ourselves have built up over many long years...In the past you have proved your loyalty to me a thousandfold, and it cannot and will not be different in the future."
Thus Hitler absolved the SA membership from any complicity in the events precipitating the blood purge. And amid a hearty chorus of 'Sieg Heils,' the Brownshirts sounded their approval. Any concerns over possible trouble from the SA during the Rally had been unfounded.
Riefenstahl's film next shows a lengthy sequence featuring the grand finale parade, and concludes with Hitler's speech at the closing ceremony in which he labels the Rally "a most impressive display of political power." Hitler goes on to declare the Nazi Party "will be unchangeable in its doctrine, hard as steel in its organization, supple and adaptable in its tactics. In its entity, however, it will be like a religious order..."
For many Germans, a trip to the Nuremberg Rally was indeed a religious-like experience and they returned home with renewed dedication to the Nazi cause and increased devotion to their Führer.
Upon the very first screening of Triumph of the Will in 1936 the Nazis knew they had struck propaganda gold. The film played to packed movie theaters throughout Germany. For her efforts, Riefenstahl received a Cultural Achievement award from Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry. The film also won a gold medal for its artistry at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris.
The legacy of Triumph of the Will lives on today in the numerous TV documentaries concerning the Nazi era which replay portions of the film in regard to Hitler's early days, or show snippets of euphoric Hitler Youth, or the SS goose-stepping smartly on parade.
The film's most enduring and dangerous illusion is that Nazi Germany was a super-organized state that, although evil in nature, was impressive nonetheless.
In reality, Nazi Germany was only well organized to the degree that it was a murderous police state. The actual Reich government was a tangled mess of inefficient agencies and overlapping bureaucracies led by ruthless men who had little, if any, professional administrative abilities. From the Reich's first hours in January 1933 until the end in May 1945, various departmental leaders battled each other for power, and would do anything to curry favor with a superior Nazi authority and especially with Hitler, the ultimate authority. Hence, they would all become enthusiastic cogs in the Führer's war and extermination machines.
In 1934, over a million Germans had participated in the hugely successful Nuremberg Rally. And from this point onward, the rallies got even bigger. The following year, 1935, is remembered for the special announcements concerning the status of Jews in Germany. These new rules became known as the Nuremberg Laws and for the Jews of Europe would one day be a matter of life and death.

The Final Solution
From 1933 onward, anti-Jewish propaganda had flooded Germany. Under the skillful direction of Joseph Goebbels, his Nazi Propaganda Ministry churned out a ceaseless stream of leaflets, posters, newspaper articles, cartoons, newsreels, slides, movies, speeches, records, exhibits and radio pronouncements. As a result, the accusations, denunciations and opinions which Hitler first expressed in his book, Mein Kampf, had become institutionalized, accepted as time-tested beliefs by all Nazis, taught as fact to impressionable youths, and drilled into the minds of eager-to-please SS recruits.

Of particular note, was Hitler's oft-repeated claim that Jews everywhere were engaged in an international conspiracy to achieve world domination. In a speech given on January 30, 1939, commemorating the sixth anniversary of his rule in Germany, Hitler added a stark new warning: "If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

Eight months later, when Hitler provoked a new world war as the means of achieving Lebensraum (living space) for his people, Nazi propaganda blamed the Jews for the war in addition to everything else they had been cited for over the years.

Hitler also believed the very presence of Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe posed a threat to German victory in the war. This was based on his experience during the First World War, when Germany had experienced a meltdown of civilian morale. In 1916, as a young soldier on sick leave in Munich, Hitler had been appalled at the apathy and anti-war sentiment he witnessed among German civilians. At the time, he concluded disloyal Jews had banded together and conspired to undermine the German war effort. And he was convinced they would do it again now if given the chance.


Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, a powerful speaker and virulent anti-Semite, second only to Hitler in influence. Below: Reinhard Heydrich--coordinated the Final Solution until his assassination by Czech agents in June 1942.

Below: Photo taken by an SS man in occupied Poland reveals the innocent gazes of two Jewish youngsters, not long before the onset of the Final Solution.

From the very onset of war, Hitler and his inner circle, including Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels, contemplated what to do about removing the Jewish menace, or "the Jewish Question." The attack on Russia in June 1941 raised the level of intensity concerning this unresolved issue. On the Eastern Front, the future of the thousand-year Reich was clearly at stake. Hitler therefore adopted a more radicalized approach in his rule as Führer to put all of German society on a war footing and to squash all obstacles in the path of victory. At this time, Hitler also radicalized his outlook toward the Jews in favor of a "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," in which the war against Nazi Germany's external military enemies would be expanded to include the internal arch enemy scattered throughout Europe and Russia – the Jewish population.

And so, at the behest of their Führer, a handful of Nazi bureaucrats conspired to bring about the demise of millions. On January 20, 1942, they attended the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, organized by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, who told them, “In the course of the practical execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east.”

Heydrich revealed statistics indicating a total Jewish population of 11 million which included Europe and Russia. The initial goal, Heydrich explained, was to round-up and deport Europe's Jews to the already-established SS-run ghettos in Poland, where many would perish through harsh conditions including brute physical labor.

Inside the sealed-off ghettos, the Nazis reduced food rations to starvation level, an experience described by Sara Grossman, confined at age 21 in the Lodz ghetto: "I don't think anything hurts as much as hunger. You become wild. You are not responsible for what you say and what you do. You become an animal in the full meaning of the word. You prey on others. You will steal. That is what hunger does to us. It dehumanizes you. You're not a human being any more. Slowly, slowly the Germans were achieving their goal. I think they let us suffer from hunger, not because there was not enough food, but because this was their method of demoralizing us, of degrading us, of torturing us. These were their methods, and they implemented these methods scrupulously. Therefore we had very many, many deaths daily. Very many sick people for whom there was no medication, no help, no remedy. We just stayed there, and lay there, and the end was coming."

The ghettos, and the slow death they brought, were only part of the overall plan. In the months following the Wannsee Conference, three specialized killing centers, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, were constructed in southeast Poland, featuring large gas chambers with adjacent crematories or burial pits for the disposal of corpses. After they became operational, the ghettos were bypassed and Jews went directly by train to the new death camps.

Nearby, at Auschwitz in adjacent Upper Silesia, a much larger killing complex was constructed. Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss later testified that SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler instructed: “The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to carry out this order. I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose.”

Höss oversaw the rapid construction of a gigantic new annex called Birkenau containing four large gas chamber-crematory buildings and scores of huts for slave laborers. From the moment it became operational in the spring of 1943, Auschwitz-Birkenau served as the focal point of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews. Hour after hour, trainloads of Jews arrived from all over Europe. The people were subjected to a life-and-death selection process by SS medical personnel such as Dr. Josef Mengele. Adults who seemed fit for labor were allowed to live and were marched away. All others, including children, the elderly and anyone deemed unfit went straight to the gas chambers.

The SS used Sonderkommandos (Jewish slave laborers) during the gassing process to usher people in the undressing room and to clean up the gas chamber afterwards. One such survivor recalled the scene at Auschwitz: "There were all sorts of reactions from all sorts of people. There were disabled people. They would take out their war service cards showing that they had fought in the First World War with all kinds of distinctions and medals which they had from that time. They shouted, what's this? We fought for Germany. Now they're going to burn us, to kill us. This is impossible. We protest against such a thing. But everyone just laughed at them. Because they didn't take it seriously, these SS men. They laughed at the whole thing."

To remain efficient, the SS death factories required a steady supply of humans. To coordinate the flow of people to the gas chambers, Höss and fellow commandants relied on SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who became a central figure in the day-to-day management of the Final Solution. Present at the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann assumed the leading role in facilitating the deportation of Jews from every corner of Europe. With boundless enthusiasm for his task and fanatical efficiency, Eichmann traveled the continent, insuring that trainload after trainload departed. "The trains," Eichmann said later, "ran like a dream."

The SS organization also found it could profit financially from the human traffic. Upon arrival in the camps, all belongings were taken from the Jews. Foreign currency, gold, jewels and other valuables were sent to SS Headquarters of the Economic Administration. Wedding rings, eye glasses, shoes, gold fillings, clothing and even hair shorn from women also served to enrich the SS, with the proceeds funneled into secret Reichsbank accounts. Watches, clocks and pens were distributed to soldiers at the Front while clothing was given to German families.

To SS officials and the Nazi bureaucrats involved, it appeared the Final Solution was proceeding smoothly. In August 1944, Eichmann reported satisfactorily to Himmler that approximately 4 million Jews had been gassed while another 2 million had been shot in the East by mobile execution units.

By this time, news of the mass murders had leaked out of occupied Europe via first-hand accounts from eyewitnesses, escapees and other informed persons. Newspapers such as The London Daily Telegraph and The New York Times also published occasional reports of executions along with death toll estimates. World reaction to the reports changed little from what it had been to prewar reports of Nazi persecution – a few political speeches from Britain and America.

Inside the camps, the inmates fretted, as one Auschwitz survivor recalled: "We always used to say where is the whole world? Where is the United States? Where is Russia? And where are all those countries that could do something to help? Do they know what's happening here in the extermination camps at all?"

About this time, two Jewish inmates escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau and made it safely to Czechoslovakia. One of them, Rudolf Vrba, submitted a detailed report concerning the gas chambers to the Papal Nuncio in Slovakia which was forwarded to the Vatican, received there in mid-June 1944. However, nothing came of it.

Throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, relatively few non-Jewish persons were willing to risk their own lives to help the Jews. Notable exceptions included Oskar Schindler, a German who saved 1,200 Jews by moving them from Plaszow labor camp to his hometown of Brunnlitz. The Nazi-occupied nation of Denmark rescued nearly its entire population of Jews, over 7,000, by transporting them to safety by sea. Italy and Bulgaria both refused to cooperate with Nazi demands for deportations. Elsewhere in Europe, people generally stood by passively and watched as their neighbors were marched through the streets toward waiting trains, or in some cases, actively participated in Nazi roundups.

Alone and against seemingly impossible odds, Jewish men and women struck back on occasion. In April 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged an armed battle against SS troops lasting five weeks. In October 1943, nearly 300 Jews and Soviet POWs overpowered guards and broke out of Sobibor death camp, which was then shut down by the SS. A year later, a revolt by Jewish slave laborers at Auschwitz-Birkenau resulted in the destruction of one of the main gas chamber-crematories. Elsewhere, Jews who eluded capture became partisans, particularly in Russia, where some 30,000 Jews fought alongside the Soviets to disrupt Hitler's armies.

After the German defeat at Stalingrad, the oppressed peoples of occupied Europe and Russia, including the Jews, could sense that Hitler's Germany was in decline. However, time itself had become an enemy for the dwindling number of Jews.

How long would it take the Allies to win – and would they still be alive when victory came?

Meanwhile they waited, trying with all their strength to survive just one more day – the slave laborers, the fortunate few still not discovered – and those confined in ghettos such as the teenager who wrote in her diary: “When we look at the fence separating us from the rest of the world, our souls, like birds in a cage, yearn to be free. How I envy the birds that fly to freedom.”

The Third Reich that Hitler had founded was intended to last a thousand years. But it was already tearing around the edges, confronted by an ever-growing force of nations rallying to smash Hitler's empire, on land, and on the high seas.

A terrible darkness had descended across Europe. An entire way of life had been turned upside down by one man, Adolf Hitler, and his followers. Instead of sitting in a classroom, pondering a career, or perhaps working in a local shop, young Jewish men and women found themselves without a future – isolated and cast out. Instead of kicking a ball around in the park, making new friends, or going on a class picnic, Jewish children found themselves deprived of these simple joys – shunned and excluded.
Meanwhile, their parents agonized. They had always thought of themselves as upstanding citizens, who happened to be Jewish. They had served in the government, fought bravely in prior wars, paid taxes, obeyed the law and otherwise aspired to lead decent lives while seeking happiness for their children, just like anyone else. But now they had been labeled as enemies.
Wherever the Nazis went, they poisoned minds, corrupting the attitudes of local people who had cared little, till now, whether their next door neighbors went to the temple on Saturday instead of church on Sunday. Under relentless pressure from the Nazis, many locals became eager to cooperate, including police and government officials who issued specially marked identity cards and then compiled comprehensive lists so that by the time of the Final Solution, no village, town, city, county, state or nation had been left uncatalogued as to the precise number of Jews and their exact whereabouts.
Following this, master timetables were created by the SS to enact orderly deportations. In each place, Nazis and local police rounded up the people, street by street, marching them off to the local train depot where they were crowded into railroad boxcars normally used to transport freight or livestock, and sent off without food or proper sanitation, on a perilous week-long journey to the East.
Waiting for them along the railroad siding at Auschwitz-Birkenau were men of the SS-Totenkopf – the Death's Head battalion. Around the clock, seven days a week, the trains arrived from all over Europe. In June 1944, a train from Slovakia, carrying 18-year-old Alexander Ehrmann and his family pulled in:
"We arrived around one o'clock in the morning in an area with lights, floodlights, and stench. We saw flames, tall chimneys. We still did not want to accept that it was Auschwitz. We preferred to think we didn't know than to acknowledge, yes, we are there. The train stopped. Outside we heard all kinds of noises, stench, language, commands we didn't understand. It was in German but we didn't know what it meant. Dogs barked. The doors flung open, and we saw strange uniformed men in striped clothes. They started to yell at us in the Yiddish of Polish Jews: "Schnell! Raus! " We started to ask them, "Where are we?" They answered, "Raus, raus, raus!" Sentries and their dogs were there, and they yelled at us also. "Macht Schnell!" We got out and they told us to get in formations of five, and to leave all the luggage there. We asked one of the guys, "Tell me, tell me, where are we going?" "Dort, geht," and he pointed towards the flames. We had to move on. So we formed up, true to family tradition, two parents, the oldest sister, and the next sister and the child on my sister's hand. My mother asked her, "Let me carry him," two and a half years old. She said, "No, I'll take care of my own son." So the three sisters and my two parents were walking and the two boys in the next row with three other people. We came up to Mengele, we were standing there. He was pointing left, right. My sister was the first one, with a child, and he pointed to the right. Then my mother, who had a rupture, she had a big belly, she looked like she was pregnant, she wasn't. So I guess that made her go to that side. My father and the two sisters were pointed to his left. He asked my father, "Old man, what do you do?" He said, "Farm work." And then came the next row and the two of us were told also to go after our father and two sisters; and he stopped and he called my father back. "Put out your hand!" So my father showed him his hand and Mengele smacked him across the face and pushed him to the other side. And he continued, "Schnell!" And the sentries were there, and the dogs and we have to move, and that's the last we saw of our parents and sister and nephew."
Alexander had been allowed to live, selected by SS Doctor Josef Mengele for slave labor. His parents, sister and nephew, rejected by Mengele, were now moving with many others toward a sign saying "Baths." Taken down a flight of stairs to the underground facility, they wound up in what appeared to be a large undressing room, similar to the tiled room one might find at a public bath or swimming pool. With no time to think, they were told to undress completely and hang their clothing on the numbered hooks located along the wall, and also instructed to memorize the hook number for later, so they could retrieve their clothing after their shower. Pieces of soap were handed out to some and they were all quickly ushered into what seemed, at first glance, to be very large shower room. But as soon as everyone was crammed inside, the main door was slammed and sealed tight.
As they stood there in anxious anticipation, SS men above the chamber opened cans of the commercial pesticide Zyklon-B and poured the contents, small blue crystalline pellets, into hollow shafts made of perforated sheet metal which extended to the floor of the gas chamber. The pellets fell to the bottom of the shaft and vaporized upon contact with air, emitting blue-tinged cyanide fumes that oozed out at floor level, rising slowly. The fumes had a noticeable burnt almond-like odor. When inhaled, the bitter smelling vapors combined with red blood cells, robbing the body of life-giving oxygen, causing the people to gasp for air, followed by unconsciousness, then death through oxygen deprivation. Children were the first to die first since they were closer to the floor. As the fumes expanded upward, pandemonium erupted with everyone else climbing on top of each other, forming a tangled heap of bodies all the way to the ceiling.
Fifteen minutes later the chamber was silent. Electric vents were activated by SS men to draw out the remaining fumes. The door was then opened and special squads of Jewish slave laborers called Sonderkommandos entered to untangle the corpses, now dripping with a combination of blood, urine and feces. The bodies were washed down with hoses, pried apart with hooks and then removed one-by-one. The corpses were then placed on carts and rolled onto special lifts taking them one floor up to the crematory ovens. There, other Sonderkommandos went about the task of removing the bodies from the carts. Any teeth with gold fillings were extracted, rings pulled off fingers, women's hair shorn and collected, and all body orifices were searched for hidden valuables. The bodies were then placed in the ovens.
Cremation was the slowest part of the extermination process, taking about fifteen minutes per body. Sometimes the ovens couldn't handle the volume of corpses when too many trainloads arrived. Therefore open fire pits were used to cremate bodies. By the summer of 1944, six huge fire pits were in use to accommodate the accelerated deportation of Hungary's Jews to the gas chambers. During that time, Auschwitz-Birkenau recorded its highest-ever daily number of persons gassed and burned at just over 9,000.
When Alexander was on his way to his slave labor quarters, he passed by one of the cremation pits. "We were walking, and beyond the barbed wire fences there were piles of rubble and branches, pine tree branches and rubble burning, slowly burning. We're walking by, and the sentries kept on screaming, "Lauf, Lauf " and I heard a baby crying. The baby was crying somewhere in the distance and I couldn't stop and look. We moved, and it smelled, a horrible stench. I knew that things in the fire were moving, there were babies in the fire."
Occasionally SS men grabbed noisy babies from their mothers and threw them alive into the fire pit. Such behavior was not extraordinary at Auschwitz where SS personnel relished the opportunity to wield the power of life and death over beings they considered less than human.
Filip Müller, who spent time as a Sonderkommando working in the gas chambers, commented on mentality of the SS Sergeant who ruled over him. "We prisoners and [SS-Unterscharführer] Stark were worlds apart. For us he seemed to have no human feelings whatever. We only knew him as one who gave his commands brusquely, insulted, abused and threatened us continually, goaded us to work, and beat us mercilessly. To his superiors he was diligent and subservient. I often wondered how it was possible for this young man, scarcely older than myself, to be so cruel, so brutal, harboring so unfathomable a hatred of the Jews. I doubted whether he had actually ever come into close contact with Jews before he came to Auschwitz. He was no doubt a victim of that Nazi propaganda which put the blame for any misfortune, including the war, on the Jews. How was it possible, I often asked myself, for a young man of average intelligence and normal personality to carry out the unspeakable atrocities demanded of him in the belief that thereby he was doing his patriotic duty, without ever realizing that he was being used as a tool by perverted political dictators?"
Slave laborers such as Filip and Alexander existed from moment to moment, clinging to life, knowing they could be killed by an SS man for any reason at any time, and would never know why. Dressed in blue-striped uniforms, with an ID number tattooed on their left forearm, they resided with fellow laborers in crammed wooden barracks on starvation rations, while working twelve hours per day. The average life span under such conditions was about three months.
The sprawling Auschwitz complex included 30 labor camps with 100,000 inmates supporting entire industries. German companies, in cooperation with the SS, were eager to take advantage of the ready labor supply in an arrangement that became mutually profitable. This included world renowned companies such as I.G. Farben chemical works, and Krupp armaments.
SS doctors such as Mengele also exploited inmates as a ready supply of subjects for human medical experiments. Of particular interest to Dr. Mengele were twin children, and he set aside some 1500 pairs for rogue genetic research that killed nearly all of them.
One extraordinary aspect of the journey to Auschwitz was that the Nazis often charged Jews deported from Western Europe train fare as third class passengers under the guise that they were being "resettled in the East." The SS sometimes made new arrivals sign picture postcards showing the fictional location "Waldensee," mailed to relatives back home with the printed greeting: "We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival."
A terrible darkness had descended across Europe, and in its shadow the light of joy, hope, and human potential was diminished. But by mid-1944, a million-and-a-half Allied soldiers were assembled in southern England, ready to invade Europe and open up a new front against Hitler's empire of death. All that remained was for General Eisenhower to choose the invasion date.

The Rise of Hitler: Success and Suicide
Success and a Suicide
- The years 1930 and 1931 had been good for Hitler politically. The Nazis were now the second largest political party in Germany. Hitler had become a best-selling author, with Mein Kampf selling over 50,000 copies, bringing him a nice income. The Nazi Party also had fancy new headquarters in Munich called the Brown House.
- Money was flowing in from German industrialists who saw the Nazis as the wave of the future. They invested in Hitler in the hope of getting favors when he came to power. Their money was used to help pay the growing numbers of salaried Nazis and fuel Goebbels' propaganda machine.

|| Ever-larger crowds for Hitler - the packed Sports Palace in Berlin during a Nazi campaign rally. Below: Newly elected Nazis give the Hitler salute while entering the Reichstag building to take their seats.

|| Below: Hitler surrounded by supporters inside the Brown House, Nazi headquarters in Munich.

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The German General Staff was also investing support in Hitler, hoping he meant what he said about tearing up the Treaty of Versailles which limited their Army to 100,000 men and also prevented modernization. The generals had been encouraged by Hitler's performance as a witness during the trial of three young regular Army officers charged with spreading Nazi doctrines in the German Army.

Hitler had used his appearance in the courtroom to send a message to the General Staff that there would be no attempt to replace the regular Army with an army of storm troopers and that once in power, the Nazis would raise the German Army to new heights of greatness. This was exactly what the generals wanted to hear.
It was however, the SA, his own storm troopers, that gave Hitler problems. Many of the violence prone, socialist leaning SA members wanted to become a new German revolutionary army. They also embarrassed Hitler by wreaking havoc in the streets despite his order to lay low. Hitler had to use his personal bodyguard, the SS, under its chief, Heinrich Himmler, to put down a small SA revolt in Berlin led by Captain Walter Stennes.
Hitler installed former SA leader, Ernst Röhm, as the new leader to reorganize and settle down the SA, now numbering over 60,000 members. The SA, however, and its leadership would remain a problem for years for Hitler, culminating in a major crisis a few years down the road.
It was in his personal life, however, that Adolf Hitler was about to face a crisis that would shake him to the core.
Back in the summer of 1928, Hitler had rented a small country house at Berchtesgaden which had a magnificent view of the Bavarian mountains and years later would be the site of his sprawling villa.
For Hitler, then aged 39, it was the first place he could truly call home. He settled into the little country house and invited his step sister, Angela, to leave Vienna and come to take over the daily household chores. Angela arrived along with her two daughters, Friedl and Geli.
Geli was a lively 20-year-old with dark blond hair and Viennese charm, qualities that were hugely appealing to a man nearly twice her age. Hitler fell deeply in love with her. He fawned over her like a teenager in love for the first time. He went shopping with her and patiently stood by as she tried on clothes. He took her to theaters, cafés, concerts and even to Party meetings.
This relationship between Hitler and his niece was for the most part socially acceptable according to local customs since she was the daughter of his half sister.
Young Geli enjoyed the attention of this man who was becoming famous. Strangers would come over and ask Hitler for a souvenir or an autograph while they were sitting in a café. There were also the trappings of power, SS body guards, a chauffeur, and obedient aides.
But young Geli had a tendency to flirt. Although she liked the attention of this older man, she yearned for the company of young people. She had a number of romances, including one with Hitler's chauffeur, who got fired as a result.
Though Hitler cast a jealous and disapproving eye on Geli's romances, he was flirting himself with a fair-haired 17-year-old named Eva Braun, who worked in the photography shop run by his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann.
Hitler's jealousy and possessiveness of his niece made her life increasingly claustrophobic, especially after she moved in with him to a fancy nine-room apartment in Munich. Everywhere she went, she had two Nazi chaperons and had to be back home precisely at the time her uncle ordered. She couldn't do anything without his permission. And each time she tried to get free of her uncle's constraints, he tightened his grip.

|| Hitler's niece and love interest, Geli Raubal.

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Hitler's stormy relationship with Geli worsened. There were many loud arguments.

In September of 1931, Hitler ordered her to stay at his apartment and not go to Vienna while he was away. This made her furious. A huge argument followed. She desperately wanted to go. Hitler said no.
As Hitler headed outside to his car to leave for an SA meeting, Geli went to the window and yelled down to him asking one more time if she could go. Hitler yelled back a stern "No!"
He departed with an uneasy feeling about the whole situation.
The next morning, on the way to Hamburg, Hitler's car was flagged down by a taxi. Rudolf Hess was on the telephone line back at the hotel Hitler had just left and wanted to speak to him immediately.
When Hitler picked up the phone there, he was told his niece had shot herself. In a frenzy, Hitler rushed back to Munich. But by the time he got back to his apartment, Geli's body had been already removed. She had shot herself through the heart with a pistol.
The love of his life was gone, and under horrible circumstances. To make matters worse, there were rumors in the press she might have been murdered, perhaps even on Hitler's orders. Hitler became deeply depressed and spent days pacing back and forth without stopping to eat or sleep.
Hermann Göring would later say Adolf Hitler was never the same after the suicide of his beloved niece. Hitler later said Geli was the only woman he ever loved. He always kept portraits of her hung on the wall, decorated with flowers on the anniversaries of her birth and death. Whenever he spoke of her, it was often with teary-eyed reverence.
Curiously, shortly after her death, Hitler looked with disdain on a piece of ham being served during breakfast and refused to eat it, saying it was like eating a corpse. From that moment on, he refused to eat meat.